IBM POWER8 Tops STAC-A2 Benchmark in Win for OpenPOWER

In mid-March the Security Technology Analysis Center (STAC) released the first audited STAC-A2 Benchmark results for a server using the IBM Power8 architecture. STAC provides technology research and testing tools based on community-source standards. The March benchmark results showed that an IBM POWER8-based server can deliver more than twice the performance of the best x86 server when running standard financial industry workloads.

IBM Power System S824

This is not IBM just blowing its own horn. The STAC Benchmark Council consists of a group of over 200 major financial firms and other algorithmic-driven enterprises as well as more than 50 leading technology vendors. Their mission is to explore technical challenges and solutions in financial services and develop technology benchmark standards that are useful to financial organizations.

The POWER8 system not only delivered more than twice the performance of the nearest x86 system but its set four new performance records for financial workloads, 2 of which apparently were new public records. This marked the first time the IBM Power8 architecture has gone through STAC-A2 testing.

The community developed STAC-A2 benchmark set represents a class of financial risk analytics workloads characterized by Monte Carlo simulation and Greeks computations. Greeks computations cover theta, rho, delta, gamma, cross-gamma, model vega, and correlation vega. Together they are referred to as the Greeks. Quality is assessed for single assets by comparing the Greeks obtained from the Monte Carlo with Greeks obtained from a Heston closed form formula for vanilla puts and calls. Suffice to say, this as an extremely CPU-intensive set of computations. For more detail, click here.

In this case, results were compared to other publicly-released results of warm runs on the Greeks benchmark (STAC-A2.β2.GREEKS.TIME.WARM). The two-socket Power8 server, outfitted with two 12-core 3.52 GHz Power8 processor cards, achieved:

Only 10% less performance than the best-performing solution, a Supermicro server with two 10-core Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2 @ 3.0GHz (Ivy Bridge) and one NVIDIA K80 GPU accelerator.

The Power server also set new records for path scaling (STAC-A2.β2.GREEKS.MAX_PATHS) and asset capacity (STAC-A2.β2.GREEKS.MAX_ASSETS). Compared to the best four-socket x86-based solution — a server comprised of four Xeon E7-4890 v2 (Ivy Bridge EX) parts running at 2.80 GHz — the Power8 server delivered:

Double the throughput.

16 percent increase for asset capacity.

The STAC test system consisted of an IBM Power System S824 server with two 12-core 3.52 GHz POWER8 processor cards, equipped with 1TB of DRAM and running Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 7. The solution stack included the IBM-authored STAC-A2 Pack for Linux on Power Systems (Rev A), which used IBM XL, a suite for C/C++ developers that includes the C++ Compiler and the Mathematical Acceleration Subsystem libraries (MASS), and the Engineering and Scientific Subroutine Library (ESSL).

POWER8 processors are based on high performance, multi-threaded cores with each core of the Power System S824 server running up to eight simultaneous threads at 3.5 GHz. With POWER8 IBM also is able to tap the innovations of the OpenPOWER Foundation including CAPI and a variety of accelerators that have started to ship.

The S824 also brings a very high bandwidth memory interface that runs at 192 GB/s per socket which is almost three times the speed of a typical x86 processor. These factors along with a balanced system structure including a large internal 8MB per core L3 cache are the primary reasons why financial computing workloads run significantly faster on POWER8-based systems than alternatives, according to IBM.

Sumit Gupta, vice president of HPC and OpenPOWER operations at IBM, reports STAC-A2 gives a much more accurate view of the expected performance as compared to micro benchmarks or simple code loops. This is especially important when the challenge is big data.

In his blog on the topic, Gupta elaborated on the big data challenge in the financial industry and the POWER8 advantages. STAC-A2 is a set of standard benchmarks that help estimate the relative performance of full systems running complete financial applications. This enables clients in the financial industry to evaluate how systems will perform on real applications. “Those are the kind of results that matter—real results for real client challenges,” Gupta wrote.

Gupta went on to note that the S824 also has a very high bandwidth memory interface. Combined with the large L3 cache noted above it can run financial applications noticeably faster than alternatives. Combine the STAC results with data recently published by Cabot Partners and you have convincing proof that IBM POWER8-based systems have taken the performance lead in the financial services space (and elsewhere). The Cabot Partners report evaluates functionality, performance, and price/performance across several industries, including life sciences, financial services, oil and gas, and analytics while referencing standard benchmarks as well as application-oriented benchmark data.

Having sat through numerous briefings on POWER8 performance, DancingDinosaur felt reassured, but he doesn’t have to actually run these workloads. It is encouraging, however, to see proof in the form of 3rd party benchmarks like STAC and reports from Cabot Partners. Check out Cabot’s OpenPOWER report here.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran IT analyst and writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing on Technologywriter.com and here.